Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Picture a global telecom company. Three years ago, a marketing team launched a campaign microsite on a cloud platform and pointed a company hostname at it. The campaign ended and the team deleted the app. Nobody deleted the DNS record. A few years ago, that mistake could sit there for a decade. No one was looking. Today, attackers run automated sweeps across millions of domains, resolving every DNS record and checking whether the resource behind it still exists.

AI tools have made it remarkably easy for a company to expose its own data: None of these actions seem malicious, but each one moves sensitive information somewhere the security team cannot see. This new era of "move fast and break things”, a phrase famously coined by Mark Zuckerberg in the early Facebook days, benefits attackers. Company data now flows through more places, more third parties, and more delegated credentials.

Bring AI out of the shadows with visibility and control that help your organization adopt AI securely. When we introduced Sophos AI Defense in July, we focused on a challenge facing organizations everywhere: AI adoption is accelerating, often faster than security and IT teams can see or control it. New AI tools, embedded capabilities, and shadow AI are creating blind spots around where AI is being used and what information it can access.

I’ve watched AI-powered cyberattacks inch closer to autonomy throughout 2026, and I can point to dozens of real-world incidents as proof. AI-enabled cyberattacks surged by 56% over the last year, meaning 1 in 4 (25%) malicious breaches now involve artificial intelligence. The important one: on May 10, 2026, researchers documented the first fully autonomous LLM-driven post-exploitation attack in the wild.

Six AI agent security best practices for teams running coding agents and MCP servers: limit what a compromised agent can reach and catch credential misuse.

We talk about the cloud as though data somehow disappears into an abstract environment, but the cloud is still physical. Somewhere there is a building filled with power systems, cooling, fiber, servers, cameras, access control and people. As data center operators expand across multiple locations, cloud-managed physical security gives them a way to manage access, video and identity consistently across the enterprise while still maintaining local resilience.

Nearly half of the organizations we surveyed — 49.8% — confirmed or suspected that an AI agent in their environment took an action in the past year that nobody intended, expected, or authorized. That is not a prediction. It is what security and technology professionals told us when we asked them directly, across a survey of over 380 organizations, about their experience over the last 12 months. Agentic AI has moved fast. The data shows it has moved faster than most organizations can govern.

Open banking drives financial innovation but introduces new cybersecurity risks through APIs, exposed credentials and third-party integrations. Discover how cyber threat intelligence helps financial institutions identify emerging threats, improve visibility and strengthen security.

Monitoring has to happen on the device, because three categories of AI use never reach the network in a form anything can inspect. Local models run without leaving the machine. Desktop applications that pin their certificates sit on an inspection bypass list by design. A laptop on a home connection routes through nothing the organization operates at all. ‍ The uncomfortable part is that the first two are deliberate. Somebody approved the bypass, and the approval was correct on its own terms. ‍

The Model Context Protocol states plainly that it cannot enforce these security principles at the protocol level, and that implementors should follow best practices in their integrations. Every control an organization gets therefore comes from where it places the gateway and what it does there. ‍ The protocol publishes its own security best practices document, currently at revision 2026-07-28, naming the attacks a deployment has to handle.